


Behold, He Cometh With Clouds

by tomato_greens



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-22
Updated: 2011-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-15 20:57:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne's started seeing things. // Prompt: One of them keeps dreaming about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, eventually becoming convinced that they're real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Behold, He Cometh With Clouds

**Author's Note:**

> From this [prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/17044.html?thread=36201364#t36201364) at Round 13 of the Inception Kink Meme.

It starts softly, in the corners, like whispers, the eery ring of hooves on hard-packed, dried up dirt, a shiver at the base of the spine, the distant sounding of warring horns sounding in terrible, joyful triumph. But it takes three jobs in two months before things start going to shit.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Arthur asks her.

"Sure," says Ariadne, "I've just got this eyelash."

"You've been rubbing it for a while," Arthur says.

"I'll get it," Ariadne says, and digs a little deeper.

"Okay," says Arthur, and leaves her alone in the dream, in the bizarre medieval world she's been constructing for the Karmickel, all empty fields and religious relics hidden in tree knots.

She doesn't have an eyelash, not really, but dark shadows keep glancing across her vision and she can't think what else is causing it. She rubs a little harder and a little harder––

––until a bony hand grips her wrist tight enough to bruise and forces her hand forward, her thumb straight into her eye. She's blinded by blood, by terrible pain, by the grinning skull before her, leaning down from his burnt-black ragged skeleton of a horse.

"Little one," says the skeleton, in a voice of a thousand voices.

Ariadne tries to free herself but instead she just screams.

Another figure bends down over her, as impossibly tall as the first but uglier; his white skin drips from his frame like melting wax and his voice is sonorous with infection. "Whatever have you done to yourself?" he asks, rubbing one hand over her eye and leaving a slick trail across her cheek.

Then another steps forward, in red this time, genderless, teeth like serrated knives extending past its lips. "I wonder what we ought to do with the thing," it says, and sighs an arid breath; her good eye waters hard enough to spill over.

"You've made it cry," says the last figure, a sooty, smoky tower of a man held together by sinew and not much else. He reaches forward. "I anoint you with oil and wine," he says, almost kind. "See thou not hurt."

Ariadne sobs and wakes up, hands flying immediately to her face and finding it whole.

"You okay, there?" Eames asks from his corner.

Ariadne turns to reassure him she was fine, just had a Somnacin dosage problem or something, when his skin turns white and his cheek begins to droop. She scrambles away from him and bumps into Arthur––but no, it's not Arthur at all, underneath the suit he's become a misshapen blackened _thing_ ––and so she runs to Yusuf, dear Yusuf, who smiles at her with teeth like knives––and after turning four times around she comes face to face with the last, the only, the Alpha and Omega, Lord Death himself, Dominic Cobb's once-pretty eyes dangling by threads from their sockets.

She turns grimly and grabs the emergency gun in her desk. She needs to wake up.


End file.
